Critical about Criticism: Arnold, Frye, White, and McKeon

     Ok, last night I finally finished Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). It took me more than a week, I admit, but I don’t think I have been altogether unproductive. During the same period I initiated a new practice (part of the “forest” initiative) where I read the introduction to a major critical-text every day or so, and immediately draft an annotated bibliography blurb on it. So while finishing the second half of Udolpho, I read and wrote on the introductions to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), and finally finished Matthew Arnold’s The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864-5) and Michael McKeon’s Origins of the English Novel: 1600-1740 (2002).

              

I had a quick, strong, cocaine-ish response to the critical works, given that they all speak to one another in a continuous, engaged, and contentious conversation with one another.

There is a readily discernible passing of the baton from Arnold to Frye, Frye to White, and White to McKeon. Matthew Arnold’s definition of criticism as the disinterested identification, investigation, and propagation of the best art, with the wider goal of maintaining the free flow of ideas (thus assuring the fertilization of still more great art) is all but echoed by Frye in Anatomy ninety years later. Frye’s real dissent from Arnold is, first, that Arnold doesn’t make good on his own call for ideological and political disinterestedness, given that Arnold’s criticism is ultimately aimed at producing a Christian moral-religious perfection and, second, Arnold’s tendency to think of art/literature as readily hierarchizable in terms of objective, artistic value. Again, Frye points to ethnocentric contradictions in Arnold’s critique of mere “parochial taste” as opposed to real criticism, positing that any hard and fast canonization of some art at the expense of others denotes, to use Arnold's own words against him, a “parochial” taste." Frye’s criticisms of Arnold, of course, grow out of of his own affectionate commitment to Arnold; he only criticizes Arnold in terms of Arnold’s own values, in a way re-fitting Arnold’s conception of criticism for the multi-culturalism of the next half century which will prove inhospitable to Arnold’s signature distinction between high and low culture. I like how Anatomy, best known as Frye’s pre-structural, formalist break with New Criticism, also serves as a bridge for Arnold’s conception of criticism over troubled modernist waters.       

               From there, Frye asserts that literature-art forms itself out of swirling currents of repeated structures and motifs, and that identifying these formations is the major part of criticism. For instance, Western literature repeatedly structures itself in terms of the three aspects of literature (the tragic, comic, and thematic) and five modes (mythic, low mimetic, high mimetic, and ironic). In Metahistory, White contends that Frye’s (and others) generic formalizations apply to and structure the production of history contending that history-production is a literary act and thus that history and historiography are susceptible to literary theory. McKeon, in Origins, takes this one step further, and demonstrates convincingly that history and literary art are historically produced discursive formations that, although now seem mutually exclusive, at one time, at a different point of empiricism’s ever evolving relationship with Western discourse, were practically indistinguishable. McKeon’s text seems to me as directly, if not admittedly, in conversation with White as Frye is with Arnold. White’s lexicon and theoretical tool box – the notions of “dialectic” etc – seem to recur in McKeon in one form or another, which is to say: the very theoretical tissue of both arguments is cut from the same cloth.